


history

by nebulousviolet



Series: aftg character studies [9]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: (thats bc nathans a piece of shit), Character Study, F/M, Mild Gore, domestic abuse, lowercase abuse, probable overuse of metaphors, wow i sure love comparing people to human functions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-15
Updated: 2017-09-15
Packaged: 2018-12-30 07:05:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12103365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nebulousviolet/pseuds/nebulousviolet
Summary: nathan wesninski had always had friends in high places.





	history

**Author's Note:**

> this idea was given to me by frostandcoal, who not only is a sweetheart but whose writing has me shook yall should check her out!!  
> i know that this and the last entry to this series are quite short but...i feel as if these characters, while complex, are easier to sum up with fast, linear pacing? and im using past tense bc theyre DEAD xo  
> and yes, i didn't make nathan some loner or whatever. there were warning signs but remember: in any killer case, it's always the well-liked, white, middle-class boy who has excuses made for him. and there's no other way nathan could've evaded capture so long.

nathan wesninski had always had friends in high places.

in high school, he blended in with the crowd seamlessly. not bullied, not popular. had things turned out differently, he could've been the one night stand at the ten year reunion. but, like with many terrible people, fortune seemed to favour nathan wesninski. the day after graduation, he helped out kengo moriyama.  
"it's getting hot out there," he'd said to the businessman with the broken-down car. "i can give y'all a ride to wherever you're going, or at least to someplace with air conditioning."  
the next morning, nathan got a job offer.

(perhaps there had been little warning signs, earlier in his childhood. he used to get into fights with children younger and weaker than him. "it builds character," his father had said to the angry parents who showed up on their doorstep. as a young teenager, he snapped the neck of the rabbit belonging to the girl next door who'd turned him down. "you can't prove that it was our nathan," his mother had said to the heartbroken neighbour. "and besides, the darn thing was a pest."

nathan wesninski had been the quintessential all-american, except he hadn't. like too many middle-class boys in comfortable homes in cushy areas, he had been excused, again and again. he had been an only child, monopolising his cul-de-sac and his home with frequent temper tantrums. _"i told you those vaccinations were a bad idea," his mother had told his father_. again and again, the blame was passed around, because nathan wesninski had been white and male with friends in high places and impeccable manners.)

so when kengo moriyama gave him a job, he took it. it was ugly work, at first. disposing and dismembering the corpses of those who had gotten on the wrong side of the local moriyama branch, those who dared to whisper about the tanakas who had pushed them out of japan and across the pacific. nathan's parents asked where the fat checks with the foreign names on came from.  
"i got a job at a foreign bank," he'd told them, and they believed him, even if there was blood on his collar at night and there were a set of hunting knives under the bed. the little humanity nathan had left he saved for jacob and angela wesninski, fourth-generation polish immigrants who would've sobbed had they known their son was cutting up dead bodies.

but soon those bodies had pulses. rising through the ranks was like cutting through butter, slippery but simple enough. nathan wesninski first dismantled a person alive with a knife the day of his nineteenth birthday. there had been a coldness in his bones, a fanaticism glittering in his eyes as he took the blade to the man not much older than himself and began to carve his name right down to the bones. _it dripped with scarlet and would not stop, even when he set it down._ the next day, a check with a sizeable number of zeroes arrived. " _it's a promotion bonus_ ," he'd lied, as he moved out of his parents' old house. he never saw them again.

(it had been a raid, three days after he'd left. they shot his mother in the head, his father in the chest. _it's lucky you weren't there,_ kengo had said on the phone. _you're valuable_. he did not go to the funeral.)

it was not very long after that he met mary hatford. she was beautiful, blonde hair that reached her elbows and warm hazel eyes that could be so cold when they fought. he did not love her, but he wanted to have her, a trophy in a cabinet for all to see.  
" _you underestimate my sister_ ," stuart hatford growled on his wedding day. and nathan laughed and laughed for the first time in years.  
"she is not your sister," he hissed. "she is my wife."  
"she is _nobody's_ ," stuart argued, that fine hatford colouring looking so harsh on a young man's face. "mary has always been her own."

in retrospect, he had been right. mary hatford was not one of his victims, powerless against a meat cleaver and waiting for the inevitable. mary hatford had held her head up high and when he slapped her she slapped him back, those hazel eyes of hers alight with something that was indescribable. mary hatford had told him she was pregnant with tight shoulders and cerise-painted lips and a knife against her throat. she had been bitter and rebellious till the end. they could dance their toxic waltz with a knife to each other's throats all they liked, but it never changed a thing. " _i will not get rid of him," she announced, her voice dangerously soft. "and if you cut him out, you have murdered a hatford, and may god help you then, nathan_."

"you do not scare me," he sneered, but she always had, and so the child was born. ( _in the end, he did kill a hatford, and the hatford was her, and he paid for it with his life_.)

his son had been a disappointment. no hiss of an iron, no intoxicating curve of a knife could stop his crying. but he had tried. he had tried to mould the clay of his child into something he was not but he _forgot, he forgot this child was half mary, he did not know that this son of his was not his in the ways that mattered._ nathan wesninski had been a virus, but nathaniel had not been a healthy cell in the first place. _(and mary? mary had always been an infection, she had always been the raised temperature and the beating pulse and the nausea that pulled you in and dragged you out.)_

that had always been his vital mistake, pretending he and nathaniel were cut from the same cloth. he liked to call it cowardice. _it was humanity_. and even if he felt betrayed when mary took him and fled, that was more mary than nathaniel. nathan had resigned himself to the possibility of having to cut his son open like he would with any other useless byproduct of the moriyamas', and so he was unattached, without emotion or feeling. in the end, it all came back to kengo moriyama's broken-down car on a hot southern day, anyway. nathan had signed his soul to the devil with a flourish on his name, but he knew what it would cost. 

and eventually, his mistakes caught up with him. _you have murdered a hatford, and may god help you then, nathan_. had he not chosen mary, had he cut the boy out of her, had he not annoyed stuart hatford then perhaps he would've lived to fight another day and use his blades once more.

but he had.

and nathan was now history, a footnote in a bloody empire. and somewhere in that empire, a new ruler rose from the ashes.

**Author's Note:**

> please comment! it's free and easy and genuinely makes me so happy ok help a girl out  
> follow me on tumblr: bookishplays


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